What’s Driving Site Traffic in 2019?

Search, social, direct… site traffic trends can be all over the place.

That’s why GrowthBadger surveyed more than 3 billion pageviews this month to see where exactly the web’s busiest properties are getting their visitors. Who’s winning? Google or Facebook? What are the main traffic sources for the top sites across industries? Which social media networks are sending the most traffic to each industry? And what are the largest traffic drivers overall, on average?

First of all, go read the entire report.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. “The niche that is most reliant on Google is Health and Medical, with 87.85% of its traffic coming from search.
2. The niche that is least reliant on Google is Crypto, with 45.74% of its traffic coming from search.
3. Facebook delivers 65.36% of all social media traffic: more visits per month than all other social networks combined.
4. Instagram drives very little traffic: under 1% overall across all niches. Even fashion and beauty brands that were launched by Instagram influencers (e.g. Kylie Cosmetics) receive less than 5% of their monthly visits from Instagram — while search brings in about 10 times as many.
5. The niche that is most reliant on Facebook is Business and Marketing, which gets 13.52% of its traffic from the network.
6. Facebook is the most important social network for every niche except two: Design and Development (for which the top network is YouTube) and Crypto (for which it is Twitter).
7. Google drives 8 times more traffic than all social media networks combined.
8. Search is the single largest traffic source for every niche, and in most industries it drives the majority of the web traffic.
9. The average top blog gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.
10. Reddit drives over 3 times as much traffic to blogs as YouTube.”

The full report goes into a ton more detail, complete with charts and graphs.

So, what does this all mean for businesses?

It’s simple: Search still matters. A lot.

Anecdotally, the majority of the startups and enterprises that we work with here at Layup Content are relying on search traffic for nearly all of their inbound traffic. SEO, then, makes up their entire sales funnel.

That means that SEO still isn’t dead.

But the way it works is changing greatly. We’re past the days of keyword stuffing, alt tagging and all the rest of the old tricks. Today’s successful search projects are driven by one thing: quality content.

Topics matter, authority matters and context matters.

Are you disappointed with your search performance? Drop us a line at hello@wearelayup.com and learn more about how we can help you reach your goals.